Anyone who knows  me well will tell you that I am one of the most unhandy men in the Lehigh Valley and beyond. That plays into this post which is about volunteering and assumptions.

I plan to volunteer in my semi-retirement and am in the process of narrowing it down to what and where I want to give my time.

About twenty five years ago I had a passion to give something back to my community. I created a list of places I would try to volunteer. My first three attempts were met with assumptions. Each, of the first three places I went, asked me if I could build them shelves! Only if you want those shelves to fall down within a week was how I replied.  The assumption was that since I am a man I must be able to build shelves. The other assumption was that, as a man, that must be the kind of volunteering I am interested in. No, there are plenty of other things a man can do. Those three places that wanted shelves were The Native American Museum on Fish Hatchery Road, The Boys and Girls Club of Allentown, and Turning Point of the Lehigh Valley.

I did end up having some good volunteer experiences after that. Turning Point gave me a chance by allowing me to babysit for the kids of battered mothers who were in the process of transitional housing. I, and a female friend, would babysit while the mothers would have a house meeting. It was fun. I never will forget this one little boy who was very protective of his little brother who he called Little Bit. Today they are probably both in their twenties or thirties! The other good volunteer experience was with Adult Literacy Center of Allentown. I taught a man how to read a bedtime story to his children. That was very rewarding. The Literacy Center is on my narrowing list of future volunteer opportunities.

So, if you are involved in an organization that needs help, please let me know. Unless it is shelves that they need.

One of the things I am looking forward to in semi-retirement is reading. Lots of reading! I have a long relationship with books, and reading, and I expect it to intensify.

My first memory of reading a real book was when I was very young. Slatington didn’t really have a library, just a few shelves in a church basement. But we had the bookmobile from the Allentown Library. It would pull up at the corner of Dowell and Main Streets and sit there for two hours. The first book I borrowed was a biography of Thomas Jefferson. I can still picture the pale blue cover with Tom’s name inside a yellow cloud. I was hooked!

Slatington eventually did get a library and it was put in the old abandoned post office. To me it was a magical place. The overpowering smell of old books and the dusty card catalog, wonderful. It was a hangout place for us teens when I was in high school. Yes, we were wild and crazy guys!

In my senior year I played hooky one day just to finish reading Rosemary’s Baby. I had my dad’s permission. I know that if mom had still been living, she would have never let me take off.

I remember in my early twenties, Slatington Library needed to expand, and moved to the former Five and Ten farther up on Main Street. Volunteers, including myself, formed a book chain and passed the books one by one to their new home. Good times!

As an adult, and even more so recently, I have been reading about a book a week. Reading let’s you explore different lives and different places. When you get sick of all that is going on in society today, you can just pick up a book and escape.

Here are some of my favorite books: A Man Called Ove, Beartown, Jude the Obscure, An American Marriage, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, A Pair of Blue Eyes, Fathers Day, The Little Paris Bookshop, Our Souls at Night, The Cellist of Sarajevo, Wonder, Rosemary’s Baby, A Blessed Child, On a Day Like This, The Woman in the Dunes, Breakfast with Buddha, Angela’s Ashes, We Are Water, Heading Out to Wonderful, The Kite Runner, Gone Girl, and A Thousand Splendid Suns.

Enjoy your day!

 

 

Everything has a lifespan. That is one lesson that I have been trying to teach my daughter, Emma. I think she may be tired of hearing it. But it is true. From the mosquito that lives twelve hours in your backyard puddle to the towering Mount Everest, everything has an ending and everything is ever changing. The Buddhists explain this with their idea of impermanence.

Since everything has a life span that also means everything has a last time. As we get older this comes more into focus. I have always been fascinated by this last time thing. Our lives are made of routine, and ritual, and tradition. Those routines come to abrupt halts. Those rituals end suddenly. Those traditions die out. And the weird thing is, we often do not see a last time coming.

An example from my life revolves around Sunday dinner. My siblings were all much older than I. So while I was home with mom and dad, as a child, my siblings were raising families of their own. Yet, every Sunday my mom would make a big Sunday dinner and, invariably, at least one of my siblings and their families would drop in for a visit and a meal. Sometimes it was all three local siblings (one sibling lived in California) with their families. There was always enough food. There was always a good time. And then, there was a last time.

Looking back I am not even sure why that Sunday ritual ended. Was it because my mom got sicker? Was it because of a move? Did my siblings’ lives just get busier? Was it when my mom died?  I don’t know, but I miss it.

Take a look at the routines, rituals, and traditions of your own life. Which ones will be around five years from now? Ten years from now? If you enjoy them, savor them! You never know which one will be the last one.

I hope that didn’t depress you, but instead gave you the motivation to enjoy this beautiful sunny day!

 

Today is a happy and proud Dad day. Emma starts her first ever job. She begins training for her job as a worker at Dorney Park /Wildwater Kingdom. For four hours today she will be learning the ways of the amusement park.  She will also be learning what it means to be earning her own money. She will be exclusively in Wildwater Kingdom and gets four more hours of training next Sunday.

Takes me back, of course, to my first job. I was a newspaper carrier for the weekly Grit newspaper. The Grit was a Pennsylvania newspaper that didn’t really have any news. It was more a collection of features and comics and puzzles. It had a rural, folksy feel to it. I still see it today, once in a while, but in a magazine format in stores.

My route was about thirty deliveries throughout uptown Slatington. Slatington was divided into uptown and downtown. Uptown went to Lincoln Elementary. Downtown went to Roosevelt Elementary.  This is not to be confused with going “outtown” which meant to the 500 block of Main Street where the stores were.

I inherited my paper route from my cousins, Lee and Larry Andreas. It took a few weeks to get the route down, but once I did it was pretty easy and took about an hour to complete. I got to know the shortcuts and the dogs to avoid. I got to know the best time to leave my house to get a chance to see  my sixth grade crush. I got to know how to keep the papers dry on a rainy Saturday morning.

Of course, the most annoying part of the route was collecting. I usually did this once a month and most people were pretty nice and diligent. However, I had one particular customer who was very difficult to get money from. She was my elementary school principal, Mrs. Rex!  I remember how mad my mom was when Mrs. Rex cancelled her prescription right before Christmas, the time of big tips.

I enjoyed my first job and don’t even remember how it ended. If I am driving in Slatington I can still recognize some of my stops. I hope Emma has memories of her first job when she is sixty five. I have a good feeling that she will.

I think this is my fifth post and I realized I have spent a lot of time writing about my past.  Having had a mostly great small town childhood, it is one of my favorite things to write about. But today let’s look ahead a bit.

The most frequent question I get when I announce my semi-retirement is “What will you do with all that time? Won’t you be bored?”. To that I answer…impossible! It’s a big and wonderful world out there and  I was born with the gift of curiosity, which was nurtured by my dad’s very same gift.

I have plans, some of them already underway.  My guideline is to spend my mornings exercising my mind, my afternoons exercising, my body, and my evenings devoted to my introverted idea of fun.

Here is my incomplete list of things I want to spend my time on: learning Spanish, learning Arabic cooking (my favorite food), learning about the 195 nations on Earth, reading, writing, kayaking, hiking, camping, genealogy, and visiting museums and historical sites.

I hope to share some of my adventures with these pursuits in future blogs. For example, my first attempt at Arabic cooking was a disaster. I tried making hummus but ended up with a blender  full of brown immovable muck. Who knew, you needed a food processor?

That’s it for today. I am off to a Pediatric Cancer Walk, on the Ironton Rail Trail, sponsored by Bethlehem Counseling Associates.

Hasta manana.

My first car was a little blue Corvair.  A Corvair!! The car that made Ralph Nader a household name. Unsafe at any speed. It was dented. It was rusty. It cost $200, and it was mine!  I was sixteen. The car was eight. I got it at a junkyard/used car lot, outside of Walnutport, using money from my elementary school savings account. I don’t think they have those school savings accounts anymore. The account was a little plastic envelope that you put a dollar in and gave to the teacher once a week. That’s how I got my car!

The Corvair was, I think, the first car to have the engine in the back and the trunk in the front. It’s shifter was a little lever on the dashboard that didn’t have a Park. You had to use the emergency brake to put it in park.

But, oh, the adventures I had with my Corvair. Driving through the fields outside of Slatington avoiding the groundhogs. Riding up and down Main Street, Slatington with my friends, radio blasting all that great sixties music! And, of course, parking with my girlfriend on some dirt road that I remember overlooked Victory Park. I drove by there recently and it is paved and full of houses.

One of the phrases under my yearbook picture is “always has car trouble”. That may stem from one particular incident at school. I had long lost the key to the trunk of my Corvair, and therefore access to the spare tire and the fuse box didn’t exist. We were all sitting in English class one afternoon and we heard a car horn blaring, and blaring, and blaring. I’m a little nervous because it sounded like my car. It was my car! For some reason, the car horn went off by itself and could apparently only be stopped by pulling out the fuse, the fuse in the inaccessible trunk. It was decided by the principal and the driver training instructor that I either had to call a mechanic or let the battery die. Knowing that the battery wasn’t doing well either, we let it blare until it stopped, sometime in History class. How embarrassing!

I now drive a Kia Soul which serves the purpose of getting me from one place to another. But I think of my Corvair often. I last saw it when it died on the edge of the woods at my girlfriend’s grandmother’s farm. For all I know it is still there, dreaming of it’s adventures with me.

 

I’m a rule follower….for the most part. I pay my bills on time. I don’t cheat on my taxes. I get all my medical tests done in a timely manner. I am on time, or early, for appointments. I count my grocery items before getting in the express lane.

I’m not saying I am perfect. Far from it. I  drive over the speed limit. I try to beat red lights. And, I seem to remember copying a smart kid’s homework , often, in trigonometry class in high school.  I’m sorry Mr. Stettler! On a few bigger issues in my life, I have not always acted with the greatest integrity.

But here are two  little stories about when being a rule follower has left me with a sense of regret that has lasted almost thirty years.

My daughter Amy died on August 21, 1989, at sunrise, in Houston, Texas. She was seventeen years old. She fought a nearly year long battle with Acute Myelogenous Leukemia. While she was fighting that disease, I was following the rules. I can recall two incidents, I know there were more, where my rule following cost her some fun in her last days on earth.

First, Amy was a huge Guns and Roses fan. While she spent her six months at Hahneman Hospital her room was usually filled with the sounds of Axel Rose. They had a song that had the n-word in it. She had a black nurse, who was wonderful. I wouldn’t let Amy listen to Guns and Roses when that nurse was in the room. What was I thinking? I’m sure the nurse could have handled it. She may have been a Guns and Roses fan herself. I was thinking of decorum over my daughter’s needs. A bad dad moment.

Second, we were in MD Anderson Cancer Center, in  Houston, for experimental chemotherapy. We knew it was a long shot, an extreme long shot. We were there over the Fourth of July weekend and heard rumors that you could see fireworks really well from a part of the hospital that was closed off for some reason. Amy wanted to sneak in to see the fireworks. Rule follower dad said no. We aren’t supposed to be in there. What was I thinking? Luckily her mom was there and took her to see the fireworks and they raced, Amy in a wheelchair, down the empty and dark halls. She gave Amy the fun she needed while I stood on the sidelines hoping we didn’t get caught. She died less than two months later.

So regrets….I have a few. I am not trying to teach a lesson in every blog post. But in this one, there is a big one. If your kid is dying, the hell with the rules!

My next post is on Friday. I promise something a little cheerier. Have a wonderful, rule breaking day.

 

Woke up. Fell out of bed. Dragged a comb across my head. Yes, there will be Beatles references in my blog. Always loved them and will love them always. And that comb? I haven’t needed one in years. I’m okay with that, because I know what really matters.

I want to share with you one of the greatest life lessons I have learned. I learned it on the job, so first a little background.

On the outskirts of Slatington PA, my beloved hometown, stood a chemical plant owned by Pfizer Inc. This plant was a least a century old. It was so old it was made of wood and held together with wooden pegs instead of nails. It was green and dark and dusty. We made green pigments that were sold to paint and tile companies. Put simply, the process took many liquids and powders, chemically processed them until they were a green liquid, then turned them into a green powder and shipped it out on trucks.

I worked there in my very early twenties. I was a young husband with a young child at home. I wanted to do a good job. One night I was working the night shift. It must have been 2 am. I blame it on sleep deprivation, but I opened the wrong valve on a tank and lost hundreds of gallons of product. I was terrified! What will happen to me? Will I get screamed at by the boss? Will I lose my job?  I immediately, and nervously, told my shift supervisor, Lawrence Grim.  He could tell how upset I was. Do you know what he said to me? He calmly said, “Denny, we’re not making blood here.”.

He was right. We weren’t making blood. Such a simple statement. Such a simple concept. Know what really matters. Know what is really important. I have used this lesson throughout my life. It helped me to stay positive when things looked bleak. It made me realize that 99% of our mistakes are fixable. It’s one of the main reasons I have been an optimist all of my life.

This old, wooden chemical plant burned to the ground in the late seventies, but I think of it often. It will come up in future blogs. Enjoy your day and remember to focus on what really matters.

This is something new for me…a blog.  Semi-retired. What does that even mean? For me it means I am only working two days a week. I love the sound of that. Having five days off a week, I get to live the life I want on those days. Well, the life that I can afford at least. That’s why it is not titled A Retired Kind of Life.

So, who am I? My name is Dennis. I am 65, soon to be 66,  years old. I have worked non-stop for fifty years! Oh, you know what I mean. Here is a partial list of jobs I have had in those fifty years: greenhouse worker, retail associate, grocery shelf stocker, chemical plant operator, lab technician, process engineering technician, HR representative, sexual abuse counselor, sex offender counselor, and Licensed Professional Counselor in a private practice (which I continue to do two days a week).  So will this blog be about work? Yes, but not just work. I have learned so much about life, through jobs that I have had, how could I not share  lessons learned?

On the personal side, much like on my professional side, my life has also been anything but routine.  I have been married…..let’s just say more than once.  I am currently happily divorced. I have three children, one of which is my first child who died at seventeen from complications of leukemia. This was in 1989. My two living children are 43 and 15. Yes, there is a story there.  I, myself, am the baby of my family. When I was born my siblings were 18, 16, 14, and 12. Yes, I am an oops baby. But just wait until you hear the story behind that!

I enjoy reading, writing, hiking, camping, and kayaking.  I am an introvert. Very much an introvert. I like to explore new areas, but am not a fan of air travel. I am a romantic. I love sad movies, coming of age books, and silly love songs…and what’s wrong with that.

My politics are left of center. Well, okay, very left of center. But I promise this blog will not be filled with political rants. Unless, of course that f**king horrible person that is now in the oval office gets even worse. Sorry, I digress.

Finally, I hope this blog will be interesting, informative, and that it will make you take a closer look at your own life. I think it will be at times funny, at times serious, but always written with love and respect for you , my readers.  My intent is to write five days a week. The other two days I will be working because I am SEMI-retired.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton